Postscript: Whatever you want to call the economic era after manufacturing (if you think there is a successor to manufacturing), I see evidence of convergence. Economic convergence is decline. In less normative terms, convergent economic activity diffuses geographically. Economic activity that used to concentrate in Silicon Valley now happens elsewhere. The world goes from, in Richard Florida parlance, spiky to flat. However, the world still looks spiky, but less so. I'm not interested in the false dichotomy (spiky vs. flat). I'm interested in the trend (spikier vs. flatter or divergent vs. convergent).

Chester is what is known, in real estate industry jargon, as a “weak market city.” The phrase means what it sounds like. The city is poor and its economy stagnant. The median home sale price in Chester in 2012 was $20,000, compared to $69,350 in nearby Wilmington and $98,000 in Philadelphia. Fewer than half of Chester’s working-age adults are employed, and a third of the population is living at or below the poverty line. In a city where median rent is $790, 51.5 percent of households pay 35 percent or more of their income to their landlords.

I think economic dislocation should be defined as "gentrification". The focus on the one side of the housing affordability equation (i.e. rent) has informed some really bad policy recommendations.

Postscript: Most people are well aware of the legacy costs stemming from an aging population. Less discussed are the costs of a young and growing population. That a growing population is better than demographic decline is just assumed. Once again, folk wisdom drives policy instead of analysis.

Your question posits whether there is a need for more housing in East Dallas, which I find somewhat off the mark. I suspect, rather, that developers are speculating on a potentially profitable market for people who want to live here. That said, I’m OK, in general, with some new apartment and condo development in East Dallas. My support depends entirely on what is being torn down and where, plus the size and appearance of what is to be built. If the wrecking ball and huge North Texas-style developments are headed for our older, traditional, single-family homes and neighborhoods, I object. A number of Dallas developers have been steadily decimating East Dallas since the 1950s. Once upon a time, Live Oak and Ross were known as Painted Lady Rows, a beautiful gateway to downtown … leveled for parking lots, gas stations and cheap, soon blighted, commercial buildings and apartments. We almost lost the incredible Swiss Avenue in the 1970s. Then the 1990s McMansion craze began its broken-tooth effect on previously charming streetscapes. If this is another wave of destruction headed for what’s left of historic East Dallas, please, let’s exercise caution before there’s little left. Guess what’ll happen once the developers have milked their short-term profits and the market for people willing to pay to live here disappears along with the old neighborhoods and the charm?

Passive residential displacement (is that gentrification?) can take two forms. The first, being priced out of a neighborhood, is the common understanding of the term "gentrification". Less common is the kind described above in the quoted passage. The quality of the neighborhood changes and no longer feels like home. The two forms of passive residential displacement weave together, but the common thread is a sense of place (how we define home).

Turning the concept on its head, consider preemptive gentrification. I want to move my family to a neighborhood where the schools are better and the streets safer. I can't because the rent is too damn high there. But I have no standing, no claim to that place because it isn't my home. I can't afford it. Tough luck.

Being priced out of a place is quite common. It would be more common if residents didn't go through extreme measures to stay put or move into the best school district. The main rub, outside of academic considerations, concerns quality of place and sense of home. But such changes could render a neighborhood more affordable. We balk because it no longer feels like home.

Seattle boasts the highest number of micro-dwellings in the country—3,000 at last count. It also permits the most audaciously minimal units, some as small as 90 square feet. That’s about the size of two prison cells put together.

It’s not for the claustrophobic, but it does come with perks—including the chance for millennials and those with modest incomes to settle in vibrant urban neighborhoods. Their presence, in turn, injects new energy to the heart of the city while tamping down suburban sprawl. Micro-housing reflects a growing zeitgeist—to stop accruing, go minimalist and reduce one’s footprint. Indeed, the name of Seattle’s leading micro-housing development company is called Footprint.

Tech companies, looking to employ well-educated millennials, are expanding their urban footprint. Millennials, looking for city-living and proximity to work, are actively shrinking their urban footprint to lower the cost of rent (or homeownership) forced up by in-migrating tech companies.

Postscript: I've told this tale before. How does one figure out if global cities undermine state sovereignty when the data are national and not urban? Geographer Peter Taylor grappled with this question. Geographic units of analysis are social constructs. The bias is built into the metrics. What we measure tells us more than the measurements. Scholars studying domestic poverty have fallen into this place-trap.

Henry L. Taylor Jr. has focused much of his work on reviving East Side neighborhoods, from the area around Futures Academy – in the shadow of the Medical Campus, but hardly benefiting from it – to the Commodore Perry neighborhood now being eyed for transformation.

Globalization will continue to pop up in the damnedest places. But the benefits won't trickle down to the poor located in isolate neighborhoods. Tremendous wealth will reside cheek by jowl with tremendous poverty. Looking at Rust Belt cities in aggregate washes out the few places where wages and rents look quite similar to those of thriving global cities, which is why gentrification in shrinking cities strikes many as ironic (or simply unbelievable).

Postscript: I'm attempting to pivot away from critiquing the supply-side model of housing affordability. I am mainly interested in how the migration of global labor (people toiling in diverging, tradable jobs) transform regional economies. Nano core neighborhoods are popping up in cities that no one confuses as global. Tradable eds and meds are driving real estate appreciation in Rust Belt cities such as Pittsburgh and Buffalo. Tracking the migration of this labor force cohort should be a leading indicator of globalization and the associated real estate dynamics detailed in my latest post.

Postscript: From Portland, Oregon to Brooklyn, NYC, a common theme emerges. Some people are willing to endure an irrational migration to a place where the return (i.e. wages) on living in the city doesn't justify the cost (i.e. rent). Ed Glaeser, Jed Kolko, and Albert Saiz looked at this "Consumer City" conundrum. In their model, certain amenities fill the deficit between wages and housing costs. In effect, a streetcar could subsidize lower wages in a cool city. Employers are happy. Real estate developers are happy. Apparently, Millennials are happy with the arrangement. Clearly unhappy are tenured residents who cannot afford the amenity dividend, as the research of Rebecca Diamond demonstrates.